The Art of the Motorcycle

As autumn continues to be summer here (everyone insists that it should be cooling off soon), I am glad that I am have the opportunity to ride a motorcycle here in Ha Noi. While I would rather ride my bicycle everywhere, the heat, combined with the fact that it takes well over an hour to get to my Vietnamese class makes doing so unpleasant and time consuming. Thus I ride a motorbike throughout the city.

 

There are times though that the road looks like this, motorcycles at a near standstill and bumper to bumper. There is no rhyme or reason to where these traffic jams occur as it they never happen in the same place twice. My hypothesis is idiot drivers in cars are doing stupid things and blocking the road, but that's just my opinion as a motorcyclist. I'm sure the people in cars hate the moto's just as much as we dislike them, but I digress. These jams are actually a potential source of injury. One day on my way to class the side of my foot was cut up pretty good when a moto got too close to mine and my massive foot, which sticks out pretty far, sliced against some metal on the other bike.
 

Despite the potential danger to myself, I find riding a lot of fun. The bridge in the first picture is the Cuong Duong bridge and is the one that I drive over everyday. I live in the suburbs on the far side of the Red River, and so I have to commute to downtown and beyond everyday. In the distance of the second picture you can see Eiffel's (The same one as the tower) Long Bien Bridge. It's in pretty bad shape and is the bridge you have to use if you are riding a bicycle. Its for cyclists, both moto and bi, and for trains. You can also see one of the biggest islands in the Red River in Ha Noi. It's used for farmland, which seems odd to me seeings though right beside it is downtown Ha Noi. It makes sense when you think about the fact that there is really no central planning in Ha Noi, you just sort of build whatever you want wherever you want.

The building in the third picture is of the Ha Noi Opera House. Apparently it is a copy and paste job of a famous opera house in Paris. I have never been inside it, but I see it all the time as it sits on the corner of one of the biggest crossroads in Ha Noi. The buildings here in Hanoi are interesting because every once in a while you run across an old French building from the colonial period, or an old Soviet-style building from the 70's and 80's, or even an old Vietnamese pagoda/temple/compound. The city has grown rapidly in the last 200 years or so, and it has engulfed many buildings and places that were formerly standing by itself. It becomes almost a game to spot these places in amongst the bland multi-story places that make up most of the buildings here in Ha Noi. 

Vietnamese classes are almost done, with only two weeks or so left. One class we were learning about road names, how to direct people to a destination, what vehicles are called, etc. when we got to a page on road control signs like stop signs, one way and wrong way. I jokingly told the teacher that we didn't need to know this because nobody in Vietnam followed the signs. She agreed with me and we moved on. I still don't know what the signs are and it really doesn't matter. I regularly go the wrong way on a one way street to get to  school.

My birthday was a week and a bit ago on the 2nd and was really interesting. Prior to the day I was taken by my supervisor at The Gioi to go get a birthday gift. He took me to a shirt shop and got two new dress shirts for my birthday. I thought that this was an anomaly, but on my birthday I received another new dress shirt. Apparently that's what you get for your birthday, along with flowers. Another Vietnamese tradition is going out for Buffet to celebrate. It was a big, long meal that left me full for days, but it was really fun. My youngest host brother also has the same birthday as myself, except that he is five years younger, and so a bunch of his friends were there as well. 

Home away from home

Welcome to my host family's house! When you walk in through the front doors this is the greeting area. The house is fairly ordinary around here in terms of design: Narrow houses with multiple floors. The kitchen and social place on the main floor and bedrooms and such on the other levels. The door you see is the end of the house

My host family, like a grand majority of Vietnamese, follow the Confucian tradition of ancestor worship. This is my families altar on the top floor. It also doubles as a storage room. 

 

 The top floor (my host-family's house has four floors) is also where most Vietnamese houses have their laundry facilities. My family has a washer, making laundry quite easy.

 

 The view from the fourth floor. This entire area is filled with people who work for Vietnam Airlines, making it a bit of a upper-middle class suburb of Ha Noi. My host-family has four people in it: My host-father, Shun, host-mother Bay, and two host brother, Hai and Nam. All of them except for Nam work as air traffic controllers. 

 

 This is my room. Nothing too amazing, but I do have cable tv, decent enough Internet, and air conditioning. I can't really say that I'm suffering too bad in terms of accommodation. 

The view from my window makes it seem like Hanoi has a lot of green space. However, what you are looking at is the Military Airport in Hanoi. I've only heard a plane once, so either they're really sneaky or I'm just plain deaf. The bars you see are fairly common. Vietnamese people are absolutely paranoid about security. Almost all windows have bars, and there are multiple locks just to get into a house. My place has four separate locks, though most of the time only two are engaged. The outermost gate is always locked, even when everyone is at home.

 

Hanoi may not have a lot of green space, but there are tons of lakes throughout the city. This is a fairly average sized one.

Translation Fun

Just this afternoon I've been given the honour of grading some translations so that The Gioi has a record of who is good and who is bad. I thought that I would share with you the opening sentence from each of them, just to give you a taste of what I'm up against.

Like many nations in the world, 54 ethnics group of Vietnam have existed the primitive beliefs.

54 ethic groups of Vietnam, like many others in the world, had ever held primitive beliefs which say that every object has a soul.

Like other ethnic groups in the world, the 54 ethnic groups of Vietnam used to follow many primitive religions.

Like other races in the world, 54 Vietnamese ethic groups also have their own primitive belief .

Like many other nations in the world, Vietnamese 54 ethnic groups have ever had the primitive religious beliefs.

Like other ones in the world, 54 ethnic groups of Vietnam have also appeared folk religious beliefs.

Like many other peoples in the world, 54 Vietnam’s ethnic groups did have their primitive beliefs.

Like many other ethic groups in the world, 54 Vietnamese ethnic groups also had primitive religions.

Like many other peoples in the world, 54 Vietnamese ethnic groups did hold primitive religious beliefs.

Like many nations in the world, 54 Vietnamese ethnic groups used to have primitive faiths.

Like many other peoples over the world, primitive beliefs existed in 54 ethnic groups of Vietnam.

Like many other nations in the world, there used to exist primitive beliefs in 54 nations of Vietnam.

As many other ethnic groups in the world, 54 ethnic groups of Vietnam also have had primitive religions.

Like many ethnic groups in the world, Vietnam 54 ethnic groups practiced folk beliefs.

Some good, some bad it seems.

The Soundless Fury

Drinking iced coffee at night on the 13th floor of a hotel overlooking downtown Ha Noi. The city never seems to sleep and the lights of cars and motorcycles bustle and move swiftly across bridges and down streets in this city. The sky is a formless grey, reflecting the thousands of lights the populate Ha Noi. It is only now that I realize just how loud the ambient noise is in the city. Overtop the Old Quarter of the city lightning flashes with astounding frequency, but appears to be stationary. It flashes in the clouds and seems to travel horizontally. I think to myself that this facinating storm that is only a couple kilometers away should be crashing and banging in the background and ruining the conversation that is going on at the table, but there is a peculiar silence in the air. At this altitude one cannot hear the street noise that is seemingly omnipresent in this city, whether one is in the suburbs or in the heart of the city. This is not the first time I have seen and not heard storms here, so it seems that the noise of the ciy cancels out the violent thunderstorms.

The Gioi Oddities

"The general offensive and uprising was also considered a strategic general drill..."

Could someone please explain to me what a strategic general drill is?

Everyone's a VIP to Someone

Happy Independance Day! If you are not as fortunate as I to be in Vietnam and are instead some place else I suppose you can still celebrate, though you may be wondering why you are celebrating. As far as I can tell September 2 is the anniversary of the day that Vietnam gained it's independance from France. People here celebrate by staying home and doing very little. I spent some time this afternoon in the touristy "Old District" and was underwhelmed by the number of people milling about. The streets were quite dead compared to what I have gotten used to.

Some wonderful Soviet architecture gracing the historic "Old District"

On Tuesday I began learning how to speak Vietnamese. Ever since I learned that I was going to Vietnam I have been recieving condolences from those with linguistic knowledge. They all claimed that Vietnamese is a notoriously hard language to learn. While it may have a Romanised alphabet (as opposed to Chinese characters) which aids in learning how to read, Vietnamese has six distinct tonal possibilties for all of the twelve vowel sounds. What this means is that a single word can have six meanings with the exact same spelling (not counting the tonal markings above vowels). Complicating this further is that the tones are both difficult to pronounce, and hear. During my lesson on Wednesday I was asked to write down what tone was being used as the teacher rattled off the same word, but in different tones. It was incredibly difficult to differentiate between several of them.

It's come to my attention that people are graphically oriented and like lots of pictures. While I am not one of those people, I have manages to cobble together a few of the meagre pictures that I have taken thus far. What follows are just a few of the things that I have seen recently.

My fellow SALTer and co-worker at The Gioi, Nathan Morrow

The view from my balcony

A gaggle of school children on a trip to visit Uncle Ho's former house

A One Pillar Pagoda

More Rain

There's a steady rain outside my window right now, flooding the streets and making it miserable to travel anywhere. Today was supposed to be the day that we go explore the old quarter of the city and check out the colonial architecture that abounds there. However, I am stuck inside the MCC office with nothing to do except write here and listen to the patter of water droplets outside the window... and the steady sounds of horns off in the distance.

On Tuesday I was issued my MCC bicycle (The official mode of transport for SALTers in Vietnam, at least until we learn how to ride a motorcycle) and have since rode it around, mostly to the office and back. Riding here is truly an experience unlike any other. It is firmly engrained in my mind that a bicycle is a sort of second class citizen on the road and is relegated to the right lane. Mentally, riding a bike involves watching out for cars and hoping that they aren't too busy grooving to music or talking on their bluetooth to notice you. Here in Hanoi, bikes are treated a little different. They are not very common (Though ostensibly they were incredibly populous a few years ago) but they are in many ways a true king of the road. With traffic that travels around 40 k/h a bicycle can keep up with much of the slow moving motorcycles and cars. Thus here one rides as if they were a motorcycle, swerving in and out of traffic. It's a little intimidating at first, but once you get a feel for the rhythm of the traffic it's actually quite fun. The best part is that while there are medians on all the major streets, one can simply just hop them and go the other direction rather than waiting until a traffic circle.

With all the rain that's happening there is quite a bit of standing water. Nathan and I went to go check out the school where we will be learning Vietnamese and were faced several times with situations where the water was a eight inches deep on the the street and no way to go around. Eventually one is forced to take off their shoes and just suck it up.